God our Refuge and Strength in this
War.
A Discourse Before the Congregations of the First
and Second Presbyterian Churches,
on the Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer,
Appointed by President Davis, Friday,
Nov. 15, 1861:
Electronic Edition.

Moore, T. V. (Thomas Verner), 1818-1871.

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GOD our REFUGE and STRENGTH in this WAR.
A DISCOURSE
BEFORE THE
CONGREGATIONS
OF THE
FIRST AND SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCHES,
ON THE DAY OF
HUMILIATION, FASTING AND PRAYER,
APPOINTED BY
PRESIDENT DAVIS,
FRIDAY, NOV. 15, 1861.

BY REV. T. V. MOORE, D. D.

RICHMOND, VA.
PUBLISHED BY W. HARGRAVE WHITE.
1861.

The sermon you delivered this morning
in the Second Presbyterian Church, on the occasion of our National
Fast, contains such a fearless, honest and forcible expression of truths essential
to our existence and success in the great struggle in which our Confederacy
is now engaged, that we believe its presentation to the public would be
of very great advantage.

If the discourse, of which you so kindly speak in your note of this
morning, will promote the cause in which we are all interested, I do not feel
at liberty to withhold it from publication, and will, therefore, at my earliest
leisure, give you the manuscript for that purpose.

A PROCLAMATION.

BY THE PRESIDENT.

WHEREAS, it hath pleased Almighty God, the Sovereign Dispenser of
events, to protect and defend the Confederate States hitherto, in their
conflict with their enemies, and to be unto there a shield:

And, whereas, with grateful thanks we recognize His hand, and acknowledge
that not unto us, but unto Him belongeth the victory; and in humble
dependence upon His Almighty strength, and trusting in the justness of our
cause, we appeal to Him that He may set at naught the efforts of our enemies
and put them to confusion and shame:

Now, therefore, I, JEFFERSON DAVIS, President of the Confederate States,
in view of the impending conflict, do hereby set apart "Friday," the 15th
day of November, as a day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer; and I do
hereby invite the Reverend Clergy and the people of these Confederate
States to repair on that day, to their usual places of public worship, and to
implore the blessing of Almighty God upon our arms, that He may give us
victory over our enemies, preserve our homes and altars from pollution, and
secure to us the restoration of peace and prosperity.

Given under my hand and the seal of the Confederate States,
at Richmond, this thirty-first day of October, in the year of our
Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one.

DISCOURSE.

"If thy people go out to war against their enemies by the way that thou
shalt send them, and they pray unto thee toward this city which thou hast
chosen, and the house which I have built for thy name; then hear thou from
the heavens their prayer and their supplication, and maintain their cause."--2 CHRON., vi. 34, 35.

Four times since the autumn leaves of last year began to
fall, have we been summoned to come before God in humiliation,
fasting and prayer. First, by the Synod of Virginia, in
November, before that fatal election which opened Pandora's
box in our land; then, by the President of the United States,
in January, that the cup of wrath which was slowly filling up,
might, if it were possible, pass away; then, by the President
of the Confederate States, in June, that we might be girded
for the terrible conflict that was forced upon us; and now, by
the same authority, after we have tasted of that cup, and felt
the first shock of that conflict. And surely it has been good
for us thus to draw near to God; for hardly had the voice of
our supplication in June died on the air, when we were
summoned by our Congress, among its earliest official acts in our
menaced Capital, to return thanks to Almighty God for that
wonderful triumph of Manassas, where the destinies of our
young Republic hung trembling in the balance until God gave
us the victory, and when His arm was made bare for our
deliverance, so that the most wicked were compelled to acknowledge
it. And now, as we look daily for other and heavier
blows upon our assailed and outraged country, assaults by land
and by sea, it surely becomes us to approach the mercy seat

again, and ask that God would still give wisdom to our councils
and success to our arms; that He would grant unto us, that
we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, and all
that hate us, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and
righteousness before Him, all the days of our life.

And we are encouraged thus to pray by the implied promise
of the text, that when war comes upon a people who have
consecrated themselves to God, if they shall penitently pray
towards His high and holy sanctuary, He will hear from heaven
their supplication, and maintain their cause. Your prayerful
attention is, therefore, asked to three leading thoughts implied
in this text.

I. WAR IS A PART OF THE AGENCY BY WHICH GOD
DISCIPLINES NATIONS.

That war is an evil, and often, a sore and terrible evil, and
a thing at variance with the spirit of the Gospel, is what no
Christian can for a moment doubt. But these facts do not
place it beyond the employment of God, as a means of working
out His purposes on earth. Sickness, suffering, famine and
pestilence, are also evils, yet God employs them in this way,
and having declared that "the wrath of man shall praise Him,"
He may also use war to effect His designs among nations.
Had there been no sin, there would have been no war, as there
would have been no suffering of any other kind; but as long
as there is sin in the world, so long may we expect to find this
huge, colossal scourge--this Moloch of evils--among men.
Indeed, our Lord expressly declares that wars and rumors of
wars shall be among the signs that shall herald the end, so that
our fond dreams of a universal peace, when in millennial blessedness,
men shall "beat their swords into plough-shares, and
their spears into pruning-hooks," may be realized only in those
final scenes that lie beyond the great day, and not on this side
of it, "in the new heavens and new earth, wherein dwelleth
righteousness."

But war is not an unmitigated evil, terrible as its ravages
are. It is like the hurricane and the flood in Nature, desolating

and terrific, yet accomplishing ends in the physical
world that can be accomplished by no other agencies. The
brooding miasma, the tainted air and the poisoned water are
swept away, and there are left behind a purer air and a richer
soil than could have existed without this purgation of tempest
and flood. Similar services are rendered by the hurricane of
war, in spite of its evils.

A long course of peace and prosperity, acting on our
depraved nature, tends to emasculate and corrupt a people. As
wealth increases, unless religion advances with it, luxury grows
apace. Mammon-worship soon becomes supreme, everything
assumes a money standard, and corruption creeps slowly into
the very heart of a people. The refined and intelligent withdraw
from political life, either to amass wealth in business, or
to enjoy it in scholarly ease, leaving the direction of public
affairs in the hands of brawling demagogues; and the fiery
energy of youth is expended in revelry and dissipation.
There grows gradually up a worldly and Epicurean
expediency that sneers at lofty heroism and high principle as
mere Quixotic romance; a hard and brassy materialism that
measures everything by the standard of dollars and cents and
rejects all that will not pay in this coin; and a secret, but
potent scepticism as to the very existence of anything like
virtue, honor, unselfishness or truth, believing that every man
at last has his price. The general prevalence of this feeling
will at last sap the very foundations of public and private
morality, enthrone a shameless selfishness in the high places
of life, which in the end will be guilty of some outrages on
common justice and right so flagrant as to provoke resistance,
the recoil of whose violence may lay the whole fabric of
society in ruin.

War tends to break up this mammon-worship, effeminacy
and selfish expediency, to show that there are nobler things to
be contended for in life than mere material advancement; that
the chief end of man is not to make money; that there are
great principles of belief, and great elements of moral

character which underlie all human prosperity, and the sacrifice
of which will, in the end, undermine even material greatness;
and that heroism, daring, unselfishness, and a sacrificing
patriotism, are living realities, and not mere poetic romances.
As men contend for great political or religious rights, they
have a clearer perception of the nature and value of all
human rights; and as they endure hardship, hunger, cold and
danger, in defence of these rights, there is generated a sturdier
manliness, and a loftier tone of character that will descend in
kindling memories of noble deeds, at once a heritage and a
model to coming generations, inspiring them with a generous
ambition to emulate the bright example of their worthy sires.
It is thus that national character is formed. It is thus that
vigor, enterprise and honor are breathed into the heart of a
people, and that the hardy, simple and manly virtues are
worked into the very sources of national life. It was thus
that the Hebrew Commonwealth gathered its enduring strength
after the effeminacy of its Egyptian life, by battling with the
Canaanites, and purchasing their God-given homes and fields
with their swords and spears. It was thus that the Greek
republics attained their athletic sinew and symmetry, and
quickened into its beautiful life their immortal genius. It was
thus that the wolf-nursed colony of the Tiber became at last
imperial Rome, stamping in lines of iron her mighty image on
all nations and on all time. And it has been thus that God
has caused the roots of every enduring nationality to strike
deep, and grow strong, as its branches have wrestled with the
storms of war. As no nation has ever risen to greatness without
this stern tutorage, it seems but a simple induction from
the facts of universal history, that in a fallen world like ours,
war is a necessary part of the agency by which God disciplines
nations.

These views furnish no apology for an offensive war, which
is a crime as well as an evil, but they do furnish an encouragement
to those on whom a defensive war is forced; for they
show that what is an undoubted evil may be, and has been,

overruled by God to good results. Man means it for evil, God
controls it for good. It comes as a chastening for sins, and
becomes a blessing by extirpating those sins, and bringing to
a hardier life the corresponding virtues. We can thus see
some of the reasons for that general fact alluded to by Solomon
in the text, when he assumes that God's people will go
forth to war by "a way in which God shall send them," as
if war was one of the inevitable incidents in the history even
of a people belonging to God, and under His special protection,
and an incident arranged by His special and foreordaining
providence.

In the war now upon us there are special considerations
bearing on this point.

(1.) One of the sins of the Southern country has been a lazy
dependence on the industry of the North for what we might
have done, and ought to have done for ourselves. We have
looked to them to manufacture everything--from a man-of-war
to a lucifer match; allowing them to come and carry away
our cotton, wool, iron, lead, copper, coal, hemp, and our very
cord-wood, to return them in manufactured forms, whilst we
paid not only for the manufacture, but for this double
transportation, and brokerage, commission, percentage, exchange,
insurance, discount, storage, and a list of charges whose name
was legion, for the privilege of being dependent on them for
the very necessaries of life, as we are now learning to our
cost. Add to these the tribute that was paid for papers,
periodicals and books, boarding schools, seminaries and
colleges, that moulded our opinions, and the enormous expenditures
of travel to watering places, hotels, cities, and other
resorts, that moulded our fashions and manners, and we have
but a faint conception of that condition of provincial dependence
to which half a century of fishery-bounty, navigation,
tariff, revenue and commercial laws, written and unwritten,
had reduced this broad and opulent region. So enormous was
the tribute paid in this way for things wholly unnecessary, that
we shall save probably the entire expense of the war by simply

keeping at home the wealth that would otherwise have been
sent to build up the prosperity of those who would use that
very prosperity as an argument to prove the superiority of
their institutions to ours.

Now, had a peaceable separation been effected, this dependence
would have continued, until with overgrown wealth on
one side, and exhausted poverty on the other, that very
separation would have been our ruin. But separated by the
convulsive throes of war, all these ties must be broken, all these
channels filled up; domestic industry must spring up to meet
the very necessities of life; manufacturing and commercial
independence be firmly established, without which political
independence would be a sceptre without a kingdom, a sword
without a hand to wield it. Thus the very blockade, cruel as
it is designed to be, will be a blessing; and should another
war come upon us, it will not find us, as this one did, without
a mill or a manufactory to furnish powder and caps for the
muskets of our soldiers.

And in nothing does the suicidal folly of this war on the
part of the United States Government appear more vividly
than in the light of this fact. It proposes to make us friends
by hunting us down as enemies; to restore our love and
loyalty by means that must naturally produce the most undying
hate; to drag us back, all bleeding and crushed, to the
iron embrace of a huge enginery of coercive power, to illustrate
the theory of free government; to ravage our coasts,
and slaughter our sons, and distress our households, in order
to restore our allegiance to those who have thus cruelly,
wantonly and bitterly oppressed us. It professes to regard
slave territory as an unmitigated curse, and yet, rather than
allow this alleged curse to be separated from it, will raise half
a million of men and half a billion of money that it may
grasp this accursed soil with a hand of iron, even though it
thus makes it but one vast field of blood. Surely the lessons
of all past history have been in vain if such means do not
engender a hate, a deep, burning and deathless memory of

wrong and cruelty, that shall remain in its engendered
animosities a wide and yawning gulf for generations to come.
These two sections, however this war may end, shall

"Stand aloof, the scars remaining
Like cliffs that have been rent asunder,
A dreary sea shall roll between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Can wholly do away I ween,
The marks of which once hath been."

The sword may cut apart, but can never unite.

(2.) But there is another effect of the war, not less important
than this one. The deep, original cause of that mighty disruption
that is now going forward was the diversity of interests that
were included in a single government, interests so vast, and
connected with other diversities, social, historical and political,
themselves so important, that all could not be harmonized under
a single organization, without an amount of wisdom, justice
and statesmanship but rarely found in any administration.
Similar diversities remain in the separated section, which in
time must have produced the same result unless prevented
by some powerful agency. The jealousies even now exhibited,
which every good man should frown down as the worst kind
of treason; and the unkind detractions that have been uttered
against our own great old Commonwealth, without whose aid,
whatever may be said about her, the success of this struggle
would have been a hopeless impossibility, all prove that these
divisive tendencies are at work, and that one of our greatest
dangers was in the diversities that existed between border,
and cotton, and gulf, and western States, producing undue
friction in the working of government. What our young
Republic needed was a feeling of oneness, a broad, deep
national unity, binding together the separate sovereignties of the
Confederacy, so that whilst, politically, they shall be "distinct
as the billows," yet, nationally, they shall be "one as
the sea." Although the common institution of domestic
slavery is a powerful bond of union, especially in view of
the mighty hostility against it that compresses its adherents

together, yet even this could not have created this national
unity, as we had it, under a peaceful separation. Had the
original thirteen colonies separated peacefully from Great
Britain they would never have made that e pluribus unum
under which they advanced to such peerless greatness, until
the spirit of that Revolutionary struggle became extinct in a
generation "that knew not Joseph." In the same way it was
necessary that these Confederate States should be put into the
furnace of war, that they might be welded into one great,
united and loving people, fused together by common weakness
common suffering, and common triumphs; having a
common heritage of grief, and a common heritage of glory;
mingling the blood of the border States with that of the
gulf and the great valley on the same battle-fields; garnering
their precious dust in the same graves; mingling their tears
over the same hallowed sods; and thus creating for all future
time, memories so deep and so enduring as to mould into one
warm, living and enduring whole, this new birth into the
great sisterhood of nationalities.

(3.) There is another result of this war, which as far as it
exists, is a yet higher one than that just stated. War is
usually a vast demoralizer, and all religious feeling withers
under its baleful breath. And, to some extent, this is true of
this war, as we mournfully know. And in this aspect the
act of our Congress in virtually degrading the office of Chaplain,
by making it the only one in the army whose rank and
pay were cut down, and after two reductions, fixing it at a
rate that excludes from it any man with a family, who has
not private means of his own, a thing not very common with
clergymen--this marked and seemingly invidious distinction
of this office, I feel bound to say kindly, but plainly, was at
least an unfortunate act, if not more blameable. In an army
of volunteers, like ours, a good Chaplain is just as important
as a good Captain or a good Surgeon, for he is adapted to
meet those moral evils arising from inaction, discontent, weariness
and home-sickness that are often far more injurious than
the dangers of the battle-field. And we know of no reason

arising from incompetency or dereliction of duty in those who
have filled the one office for any such stigma, which does not
exist in a twofold, if not a tenfold degree with the occupants
of the others. It is a false economy that starves the soul to
feed the body, even in an army. The eagle that robbed the
altar of its sacrificial flesh fired her own nest by the living
coals that adhered to it, and so will it ever be in depriving
religion of its honest rights in any human organization.
Hence we feel bound to say plainly, that this was a wrong,
a short-sighted and suicidal wrong, although we also believe
an undesigned and inadvertent wrong, which we hope will be
remedied as soon as it can be reached by competent authority.
If the finances of the government will not warrant the
employment of men of experience and mature age in this office,
it were better to abolish it, and leave the spiritual wants of
the soldier entirely to the voluntary action of the people.
But if the office is to be retained at all, it ought to be put on
an equality with other offices of the same importance.

But in spite of all these things, I believe, that there has
never been an army since the time of Cromwell, in which
there was a more pervading sense of the power of God than
our own. A brave, but irreligious officer remarked to me
a few days ago, we may well adopt the language of the good
book, "If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, now
may Israel say, when men rose up against us, they had
swallowed us up quick." And this is the solemn conviction of
thousands, even the most wicked. The resources of the
mighty organization, whose stupendous gage of battle we
fearlessly took up, were so vast in men, money, munitions
of war, forts, fleets and armies, that unless God had been
with us we must have been crushed. When we saw the
bloodless achievements of Sumter, Gosport, Harper's Ferry,
and the river batteries; when we saw an unprotected woman
sent forth as it would seem by a Divine impulse to venture
alone in imminent peril to give the information that led to the
first victory on our soil, which struck the key-note to all the
rest; when we saw boys yet warm from their mother's hearts

stand like veterans in the iron sleet of Bethel, and college lads
from our quiet lowland homes make the gorges of Rich Mountain
a very Thermopylæ; where we saw squadrons of volunteers
stand, "like a stone wall," a sweep like an avenging hurricane
over the red plains of Manassas and Springfield, or the green
hills of Carnifax Ferry, Belmont, and Leesburg; when we saw
the very winds and waves, the very "stars in their courses"
conspiring to bring disaster on our enemies; when all human
calculation must have predicted the exact opposite; we cannot
wonder that even ungodly men have been compelled to pause
and say, "this is the finger of God." And we cannot wonder
that many a brave man, as he saw these seeming tokens of
the ascending and descending angels, and the protecting
presence of God, has found these battle-fields to be Bethels,
and said: "Surely the Lord was in this place, and I knew it
not;" that many a dear child, while pacing his lonely round
as sentinel, or standing on his perilous post as picket, beneath
the silent stars, has found his place to be a Manassah, "a
forgetting" of the wild delusions of sin, and a solemn rising to
his memory of words that he has heard, amid the sweet scenes
of home, from lips, some of which are silent in the grave, and
others of which may be even then, in the deep silence of
midnight, moving in wakeful prayer for the brave and beloved boy
who is far, far away. The many conversions in camp, the
prayer-meetings in soldiers' tents, of which we have heard,
and the letters we have seen breathing emotions of piety that
have been awaked by the exposures and sufferings of the army,
induce us to believe that this war will lead many a soul to the
Cross that might otherwise have perished in impenitency.

II. THE PROPER RESORT OF A PEOPLE IN TIME OF WAR IS
TO GOD.

All history proves, from Abraham and his armed servants,
and Gideon's three hundred men, through Marathon, to the
Spanish armada, and later struggles of heroic people for their
rights, that "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to
the strong." God gives victory as He pleases to carry out

His great and holy purposes in human history. Hence the
instinctive resort of every right-hearted people at such a time
is to that High and Mighty One, "who doeth his will in the
armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth." This
resort is proper for several reasons.

(1.) That the sins which have caused the chastening may
be removed.

As these sins have been set forth on former occasions, we
will not repeat the enumeration, but only say that, until they
are repented of and forsaken, God will continue to smite us.
Hence we should come to-day with honest penitence, and,
taking words of truth and sincerity upon our lips, should cry
to him, "Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine
anger against us to cease, and bear us from thy holy
heavens."

(2.) That we may be delivered from evils that must
weaken us.

There are evils inevitable to war from which we cannot
expect to escape. We must expect to find personal ambition
in the guise of patriotism; itch for office, with its horse-leech
cry of "give, give;" favoritism and nepotism, by which the
sons, relations and friends of those in office will be placed
over the heads of better and older men who are unable to
command this kind of patronage, and must, therefore, drudge
in humbler and harder positions; wastefulness in the use of
public funds and the granting of public contracts; blunders
in movements, both civil and military, that are hard to
explain; provoking circumlocutions and red-tape delays in the
transaction of public business; insolence and petty tyranny
in men raised from obscurity and dressed in a little brief
authority, who lord it with arrogance and sometimes with
cruelty over braver and better men placed under their
command; heartless brutality in drunken surgeons and drunken
nurses allowing sick men to pine and suffer, and even to die
from sheer and inexcusable neglect; drunkenness in the ranks,
as well as among the officers, preparing many a gallant man
for disgrace and defeat in battle, and a drunkard's grave when

the war is ended; profanity; gambling; pillage and peculation
at least in small matters; all these evils are well nigh
inevitable in a time of war, with our poor fallen nature as it
is, and can only be diminished by looking to that God before
whom we bow this day in reverent supplication.

But there are some evils that we had no right to expect,
and that, therefore, as far as they do exist, are the more
difficult to bear. We had no right to expect that flaming and
furious patriots of twelve months ago, whose voice was then for
war, denouncing all who could not go as fast and far as they,
should now be as meek and as mute as mice, leaving to others
the burdens, sacrifices and dangers of this contest when it has
really come. We had no right to expect that they who have
been so long sneering at Yankee greed and Yankee meanness,
should emulate this ignoble example by filching the funds
that the hard taxation of a burdened people have generously
given to their governments, by usurious contracts, and
exorbitant charges for supplies which the poor soldier often finds
to his cost were made to sell and not to use; buying up the
very necessaries of life to pile enormous profits on them, so
that whilst brave men are driving off the hungry invader
abroad, at the point of the sword, their straitened families
find the wolf at the door in the form of the hungry speculator,
who spares not even medicine for the sick, and will
wring his percentage out of the very agonies of the suffering;
trafficking in the hunger, cold and nakedness of the
soldier while living, and speculating upon his very shroud
and coffin and grave when dead; blockading our homes by
land as really, as wickedly, and as heartlessly as our enemies
are blockading them by sea; bribing officials to act as
accomplices with them in their schemes to obtain undisputed
control of a market; creating needless panics and needless
pressures, that they may wring from a groaning and helpless
community the hard earnings of the poor on whom these
exactions must fall most heavily; and whilst a struggling
country is bleeding at every pore, instead of seeking to
staunch that blood, virtually gathering it up drop by drop

to sell like butcher's meat in the shambles, and coin it into
gold; acting a treason more deadly than an armed aid to our
enemies, by compelling many a poor man who once calculated
the value of the Union, to begin to calculate the value of
disunion, and ask what have we gained by escaping the leeches
and blood-suckers of one Confederacy, only to fall into the
fangs of the sharks and cormorants of another; surely, surely,
we had a right to expect that in a struggle so sublime, so
tremendous, and so desperate as this, we should have been
safe from the cruel greed of such hungry Shylocks, such
human vultures as these. And if in any cases we have been
disappointed in this reasonable expectation, it but creates
another reason for coming before Him whose blood was sold
by his own chosen companion for thirty pieces of silver, to
pray that He would not only deliver us from the Ahithopels
abroad, but also, and even more earnestly, from the Iscariots
at home.

(3.) That we may have direct strength from on High for
this conflict.

Did time permit, it would be easy to show that the religion
which fits men for any duty, suffering and danger, must fit
them for the duties, sufferings and dangers of war; and that
he who believes that God is with him, and that the field of
death will be to him only the vestibule of heaven, must move
down to the dread ordeal of battle with a heart all the
stronger for this faith and hope; that the religion which
breathed such heroism into the battalions of Gustavus; that
made feeble Holland an over-match for the proud chivalry of
Spain; that nerved the iron men of Cromwell to such deeds
of daring prowess; that has inscribed the name of Huguenot
and Covenanter among the world's heroes; that nerved the
hearts of so many brave men in our first Revolutionary
struggle; that has written upon her spiritual muster-roll such
heroic names as Vicars and Havelock; that has adorned the
character of some in our own army, whose glorious work is
not yet completed, and whose names our children will utter
with enthusiastic love; that such a religion as this should be

a yet loftier spring of action than even that wild fanaticism
whose religious faith made the Moslem arms resistless for so
many centuries. For such strength then as it gives to suffer
and wait at home, as well as to suffer and strike in the field,
we should come this day, saying, in the words of the old
Hebrew battle-cry, "Some trust in chariots and some in
horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God;
and in the name of our God will we set up our banners."

III. WE SHOULD THEN GIRD OURSELVES FOR THIS CONFLICT
IN THE HOPE THAT GOD WILL MAINTAIN OUR CAUSE.

Had we far less to excite our hopes in this struggle than we
have, there is a stern necessity upon us to go forward to it which
we cannot escape. There is nothing now left us but a death-grapple
for very existence. An institution has been planted
on our soil, the ethical nature of which, as a relation in human
society, it is too late to argue, for God has recognized it twice
in the Decalogue, and devoted an entire epistle to an incident
connected with it in the New Testament, without hinting at
its unlawfulness. Like all, human institutions, it has its evils,
evils which the ceaseless assaults of its enemies give no opportunity
to correct, and yet under its influence more members
of Christian Churches have been enrolled from a race whose
ancestors were heathen, than has been done in the same length
of time by all the missionary societies on earth, much good as
they have done; and under it there has been secured more
temporal comfort to the slaves than has been reached by any
corresponding class of laborers on earth. There is one fact
that speaks volumes on this point, that in this bitter struggle,
whilst every possible agency has been used upon them, for
one colored man who has been unfaithful to the South there
have been ten whites; that whilst a Washington was fighting
and dying in Western Virginia against white traitors born on
her soil, his servants were faithfully tending the fields of Mount
Vernon, and trying to secure for him their proceeds from the
pillaging vandals, within the sound of whose drums Old
Gabriel and his follow-servants remained faithful to their master;

and that, in one of the hottest battles on the Kanawha, a
servant begged and obtained the privilege of fighting by the
side of his master, whilst that master's own blood relations
were fighting on the other side. Nor are these cases few or
far between, but enough to show that we have often more
reason to trust the black face of the honest servant who fears
God and loves his master, than the black heart of many a
snivelling white man, whose god is a dollar, and who would
sell not only his country, but his very soul, if need be, for a
fat office and a bloated salary. Let this be recorded to the
honor of the black man, and let it be remembered to his
advantage when the struggle is over, as we believe it will be,
and let it stand as an answer to some of the slanders that have
been heaped on this institution.

Against this institution, and thus both the races that are
connected with it, has been waged a hostility whose steady
course has never faltered nor turned aside. There is something
portentous in the rise and growth of this anti-slavery
Hydra with which we are now struggling. Spawned in the
huge Serbonian bog of French infidelity and radicalism, it was
a fitting coincidence that the same year which witnessed the
first development of the one in the French Revolution, should
have witnessed the first development of the other in the
seizure of that magnificent North-Western territory, which
the credulous generosity of Virginia bestowed as a free gift
to the Federal Government, to rear up on her border a deadly
enemy, by the Ordinance of 1787. Again did the Hydra
demand and receive a fresh accession to its bulk in the Missouri
Compromise, where rights that were solemnly guaranteed by
the Louisiana treaty were ruthlessly disregarded, and yielded
to the clamors of this voracious and growing monster. Again
and again was it swollen by new gorges of new territory,
purchased by the common blood and treasure of all the States,
and, therefore, rightfully belonging to the whole, and not to
any of its parts. Grown by these enormous meals, and stimulated
by the secret working of foreign emissaries, who saw in
this agent the serpent that might strangle this mighty Republic

in its infancy, it planned a more deadly assault on the
object of its hate. Suborning every avenue to the creation of
public opinion, it was able at last to inoculate vast masses of
men with its envenomed feeling, until having nullified the
Constitution of the United States; divided churches; broken
up benevolent agencies; embroiled States; stirred up Kansas
and John Brown raids; bespattered the very Bible with
its virus; breathed its poison into the very Gospel of the
Son of God, and filled its pulpits with a religion of hate;
hissing its venom from a million heads and through a million
tongues, from the Senate of the United States to the penny
pamphlet, it then proposed, as its coup-de-main, to coil itself
in one huge, stifling cordon of hostile settlements around the
territory of the Confederate States, so that having crushed
this hated institution to death by its tightening folds, these
States might be left to the terrible doom of the ancient criminal
when a living body was chained to a dead corpse to
perish by a slow, loathsome and inevitable death. Against
this dreadful doom these States remonstrated with the most
supplicating entreaties, but in vain, for the Hydra was, in
contemptuous disregard of them, exalted to the sacred seat
that had been filled by the form of Washington. Even then
they sought in fraternal conference for some guarantee against
this hideous policy, until their entreaties were taken as
confessions of cowardice and weakness, their humblest proposals
received with sneers of derisive scorn, and they commanded
to furnish men and money to murder and crush their own
flesh and blood. Then, and not until then, did an outraged
and long-suffering people rise in their indignant might, and,
appealing to the God of Justice, resolve to cut with the
sword the coils of this mighty constrictor, and crush his
beads of venom beneath their feet. And this Herculean
task must be done, or we must perish, miserably perish.
There was a time when submission and compromise might
have postponed this fate, though perhaps never have finally
averted it, but that time has forever gone by, and now they
would only make it more abject and complete, adding dishonor

to defeat, and degradation to destruction. Never since
the terrible scenes of La Vendee, under the ravaging hordes
of Republican France, has the old heathen war-cry, Voe
Victis, (wo! to the conquered!) been more unmistakeably
sounded by an army of invaders.

Let this tremendous crusade become successful, either by
mismanagement in the army, or cowardice and greediness at
home, and history furnishes no page so dark and bloody as
that which would record the result. Our best and bravest
men would be slaughtered like bullocks in the shambles; our
wives and daughters dishonored before our eyes; our cities
sacked; our fields laid waste; our homes pillaged and burned;
our property, which we are perhaps selfishly hoarding, wrested
from us by fines and confiscations; our grand old Commonwealth degraded from her proud historic place of "Ancient
Dominion," to be the vassal province of a huge central
despotism, which, having wasted her with fire and sword, would
compel her by military force to pay the enormous expense of
her own subjugation, or, in default of this, parcel out her
broad lands to insulting emigrants as a feudal reward for the
rapine and murder of this new Norman conquest: whilst the
owners of these lands must either remain as cowering factors
for insolent conquerors and oppressive lords, or wander as
penniless and homeless fugitives in a land of strangers.

Is this picture overdrawn? Does it exceed the avowed
designs of the great invasion as proclaimed not only by
partisan journals, but by those who profess to be ministers of the
gospel of peace? Did not their leading journals, at the outset
of this war, exult with gloating delight over the terrible fate
that their avenging armies were to inflict on us, our suffering
wives and our hunger-bitten children, until all Europe cried
out shame on such fiendish barbarity? And has not the work
already begun? Has not a gallant sister State been trodden
under foot by an insolent military despotism--some of her
best citizens banished to our own borders, (may God bless
them, and enable them soon to return to a home untainted by
tyranny and outrage,) others imprisoned in loathsome dungeons

without even the farce of a legal process; her Legislature
and Judiciary insulted, defied and overawed; her houses
searched and pillaged; her women subjected by the reeking
ruffians of New York stews to those outrages "that turn a
coward's heart to steel, a sluggard's blood to flame," whilst
rights of the common law, as old as the fields. of Runnymede;
rights which the Queen of England dare not violate without
imperilling her crown, have been scornfully trampled under foot
by these lawless miscreants? Have they not repeated these
atrocities as far as they dared in our own State; in Alexandria
and Hampton, and elsewhere, where the gray hairs of age, the
feebleness of disease, and the helplessness of womanhood have
been no protection against insult, robbery and murder? Have
they not made war on the sick, the aged and the dying, on
childhood and helplessness, by making medicines, and even
the Holy Bible itself, contraband of war, thus by a kind of
Italian revenge, carrying their warfare to the very interests
of the soul, and the very destinies of eternity? Have not
their most magnanimous men-of-war bravely bombarded helpless
houses and unprotected villages that two British wars had
spared, houses and villages containing the sick and feeble,
who had no other notice of their danger, and whose sole
attraction to these marauders seems to have been their weakness?
Have they not kidnapped hundreds of servants and
then made them beasts of burden; and is not their mighty
armada now prowling along our coast, intending to arm the
rest for another St. Domingo massacre? Have not sovereign
States, whose spindles were turned by Southern staples, and
whose coffers were filled by Southern gold, who refused to give
a man to the war of 1812, waged to protect their own shipping,
and the war with Mexico, to vindicate the honor of that
flag which they now so idolatrously worship; yet, now, when
their own flesh and blood, their own brothers to whom they
were bound by interest and gratitude as well as affection, were
to be coerced and trampled under foot, send hordes of men,
many of them blood-thirsty braggarts, who fly like sheep
when the meet men fighting for their firesides and altars?

And, although we believe that many an honest heart in the
North is indignant at these outrages, yet, have not all who
have dared to remonstrate against them been muzzled by the
bayonet or silenced by the Bastile? And if "they have done
these things in the the green tree, what will they do in the
dry?" If good men of the North in private life, and good
officers in public, have been powerless to prevent these things
hitherto, when they were impolitic as well as cruel, how can
they prevent their most intense aggravation, when an
infuriated and conquering army shall have crushed all opposition?
Must not our fate be all the more terrible the more prolonged
and determined our resistance? Then, if we must perish, is
it not better to die the death of a man on the field of honor,
than to die the death of a dog on the gibbet? Is it not better
to meet this huge barbaric invasion with one flaming front of
defiant resistance, than to sit hugging our treasures until the
grip of the invader is at our throats, his manacles on our
wrists, and we bound helpless at his feet?

But no such fate as this awaits us, if we are true to ourselves
and true to God. If we are worthy to take our place
among the nations of the earth, no human power may hinder
us; for eight millions of brave, united and determined people
can never be conquered. Battles may be lost, cities may be
taken, many a gallant man and many a gentle woman may
sleep in a premature grave, and many a home be shrouded
with mournful memories, and yet we shall be unconquered
still; for

" Freedom's battles once begun,
Descend from bleeding sire to son,
Though often lost are surely won."

The swamps that sheltered Marion's men, the rugged hills
that blazed with the deadly fire of Morgan's riflemen, the blue
mountains of West Augusta where Washington meant to make
a last stand for liberty, and the storied heights of Yorktown,
where he did make it, are still standing to tell us, that from
the invading hordes of Xerxes, of Varus, of Farnese, and of

Napoleon, down to the vanquished columns on the plains of
Manassas, a people who are fighting for their altars and their
firesides, in the fear of God, can never, never, never be
conquered. God will maintain our cause! He has maintained it.
Starting in this conflict as unfurnished for battle as the stripling
boy of Bethlehem going forth to meet the gigantic Philistine,
nothing but the power of Jehovah could have made the
arms of our beardless boys to vanquish again and again the
stupendous preparations of our enemies. In that God we will
continue to trust. These brave heroic boys may fall; and
though many a weeping parent may not be able to say with
the noble stoic of England, "I would not give my dead son
for any living son in Christendom," they will say with an
humbler, and yet a loftier spirit, "if God has willed that I
should lay him as a sacrifice on the altar of my country, I
bow to His will with unrepining submission, rejoicing that
though he has perished, the cause has not, will not, and cannot
perish, for God will maintain it to the end."

Hence, to every prophet of evil, every croaking Cassandra,
who tells us we are too weak, and must perish at last before
our powerful enemies, we reply, trusting, not in our own might,
but in the strength of our covenant God--

"Down, soothless insulter, I trust not the tale,
For ne'er shall our brave men a destiny meet
So black with dishonor, so foul with defeat,
Though their perishing ranks should be strewed in their gore,
Like ocean weeds heaped on the surf-beaten shore,
They still, untainted by flight or by chains,
While the kindling of life in their bosom remains,
Shall as victors exult or in death be laid low
With their back to the field and their feet to the foe,
And leaving in battle no blot on their name,
Look calmly to Heaven from the death-bed of fame."